Rainforest: The Limit of Splendour

Winner of the Mark Haslam Award at 2012’s Planet in Focus film festival

“Boyce’s Rainforest: The Limit of Splendour counters the ‘false image of the forestry industry in Canada’ offered by government and industry officials with a front-line investigation of logging’s impacts on coastal BC. The filmmaker climbs 300-footers to explore the canopy’s vibrancy, speaks with native elders and working loggers among the trees, revisits contentious forestry projects and plunges deep into the landscape for scars. ‘Go past those gates or deactivated logging roads and you see what’s really going on,’ says Boyce. He thinks logging companies are ‘fairly conscientious’ in public areas, but a 100-km drive and 15-km hike into the bush reveals eroded mountainsides, torn-up riverbeds and clear-cut old-growth, ‘because at that point they think nobody’s watching.’”

A\J will also present a discussion with director Richard Boyce, and vignettes from his new project, Coastal Tarsands (www.coastaltarsands.ca), which takes a similarly intrepid approach to framing the sea-level predicament in Kitimat, BC. Boyce believes the location was chosen as the terminus for the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline because it’s so remote and hard to document. He wants to topple that barrier and provide concrete evidence of the completely different reality than the one being presented by Enbridge and the government.